“Total War, Total Nonsense” or “The Military Historian’s Fetish”

(12,505 words)

Abstract: The two world wars of the twentieth century left in their wake not only crumbled empires and shattered lives, memories of the death camps and the prospect of future nuclear annihilation, but an addition to the military lexicon. "Total war" seemed not only an appropriate label for the recent cataclysms but a useful description of a general ph…